Hello,
(Surprisingly?) I find mocking AR (DM less so) in specs extremely
tedious
and intrusive.
Having said this, I find the approach of top-down VCM speccing very
legitimate (cucumber for V, rspec for C, and probably unit tests for M).
That is, a model is an inherent though separate part of the controller
and
trying to spec just the controller lacks efficiency (pragmatism) and
leads
to frustration.
Therefore, I’ve starting working on
GitHub - costa/rspec-orm: RSpec plugin for better life with DataMapper, ActiveRecord, etc(everything is of concept-quality
there, including the name). It’s already
“working for me”.
I think the README there pretty much cuts it, so I’d just welcome the
comments here.
Note that — I’m sorry — the code is not only unpackaged, but it is in a
separate http://github.com/costa/dev/tree/master/ruby/ in part (for a
reason).
Again, any feedback is appreciated.
Cheers,
Costa.
I’m sorry, I’d like to clarify my statement about the model, view and
controller (spec) separation.
From my perspective, model is an abstract definition which is a spec
for itself; view interacts with controller under the model contract,
and all the “model” code is actually low-level controller code which
makes the high-level code work. Alternatively, it can be trivially
said that the database state is equivalent to a sequence of controller
requests.
Hence the inclination to see the least model-related code in specs.
Thanks,
Costa.
On 21 Jul 2010, at 10:28 PM, Costa Shapiro wrote:
(Surprisingly?) I find mocking AR (DM less so) in specs extremely tedious and intrusive.
Yeah, I know what you mean, I just don’t do it any more. I find the
pain isn’t worth it on the stuff I do.
I think the README there pretty much cuts it, so I’d just welcome the comments here.
One very minor point, you’re got a comment to maybe empty the database
afterwards. It’s more useful to empty it before, as then you’ve still
got the data in the database after a failing example.
Also, if you haven’t seen it, Ben M. wrote a tool for this[1]. Oh
and I wrote one for rebuilding your database if migrations change[2],
plug plug 
Ash
[1] GitHub - DatabaseCleaner/database_cleaner: Strategies for cleaning databases in Ruby. Can be used to ensure a clean state for testing.
[2] database_resetter | RubyGems.org | your community gem host
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